Mary+Roe


 * SUMMARY: "Mary," age 19, bled to death around 1971 from an abortion performed in a California hospital.**

"Mary" is one of the women Life Dynamics identifies on their "[|Blackmun Wall]" as having been killed by a legal abortion.

Some time before 1973, 19-year-old Mary was admitted to a Los Angeles women's hospital for a [|safe, legal] first trimester abortion. Abortion was legal in California at that time as long as it was performed in a hospital. Entrepreneurs opened abortion hospitals specifically for that purpose.

The doctor performed a D&C abortion under general anesthesia. During the abortion, Mary began to hemorrhage. The doctor couldn‘t locate the source of the bleeding, so he sutured her cervix and administered two units of blood.

Mary was discharged from the hospital. Eleven days after her abortion, she returned to the hospital due to heavy bleeding. Life Dynamics doesn't record what treatment, if any, was given to Mary during this visit.

Mary returned to the hospital yet a third time. A doctor performed another curettage and put in some more sutures. She continued to bleed, was given more blood, and her uterus was packed with gauze. Still, Mary continued to bleed.

Her doctors brought her back into surgery to find the source of the bleeding. Before administering anesthesia, they removed the gauze from Mary‘s uterus. Mary lost a lot of blood and went into cardiac arrest.

A hysterectomy was performed, but ten hours later Mary went into convulsions and died. After Mary‘s death, it was determined that the ascending branch of Mary‘s uterine artery had been cut. This had been the source of her [|bleeding].

LDI Sources: "Laceration of the ascending branch of the uterine artery: A complication of therapeutic abortion," Lowensohn, Hibbard, //American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology//, 118:1, January 1, 1974, 36-8

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